Daffy - dil

This design nearly drove me daffy. If I haven't mentioned it before, I have rather strict guidelines for flowers. They need to be relatively life size and life-like. They need to hold their shape without the use of wire. I figure that if you want a tatted flower you want it for display and you don't want it to flop over like a wet noodle. I also figure that if you're going to invest that much time in tatting it, that you want it to last for a lot of years and wire, even coated wire can leave rust spots. The flowers I designed for the Transitions in Tatting book have been sitting in vase for years and they're still holding up 20 years later. I vacuum the dust off regularly and I did wash and fluff them once about 5 years ago but without wire, starch or glue they're still looking like flowers.  Those requirements add a few more constraints to your designing.  Having designed a daffodil before, I knew what I needed and just had to execute it.

Sounds easy, right? Not so. I complicated things by wanting the yellow part of it to have more than just concentric rows of ring and chain and distinct petals unlike the earlier design shown here:

After referring to various pictures I wanted the trumpet section to have a slight flare and finish with a ruffled edge. Everything I tried was too tall too short, too wide, too loose, too ugly and in short, it took multiple tries to get a finished result I could live with.

Then I started drawing it and if the tatting made me want to throw shuttles, the drawing made me want o throw the computer. It's not the computer's fault, more like I was just tired and frustrated with the design already. You never realize how hard it is to explain the construction of 3D lace until you try it. In simple terms the flower is a flat back with a tube stuck in the middle of it. Trying to show a tube shape in a flat drawing is a bit of a problem, so what I've done is to draw it as if it were stretched out so you'll see what appears to be insanely long picots between rings. I initially used normal picots with a dotted line between them, but that seemed more confusing because it might have been interpreted as picots that weren't joined.

I also considered breaking the design down row by row, but that would have made for an enormous drawing, so for now it's just 2 drawings, the back and the trumpet. The yellow petals will overlap a little bit, just like in a normal flower. The chain that is drawn in red on the base is where the trumpet attaches to the base. There is a chain in yellow tatted for the base. When beginning the trumpet tat the same chain in orange joined to the same points as the underlying yellow chain. There is a picot in the middle of the yellow chain but at the same point in the orange chain there is a left and right ring pair 7-7, with each pair joined to the pair beside them. Clear as mud, right?

Anyway, here's the pattern. If anyone tries it out and has a problem, let me know and I'll see if I can't make things clearer.

I forgot to mention, this flower is about 4 inches stretched point to point and the trumpet is about 1.25 inches tall.